portrait of Michelle McGurk

About Michelle

Michelle McGurk is a writer and quilter working to understand how tradition, circumstance, family, and place of origin shape who we become and how we transcend.

Michelle is a former reporter and press secretary, with more than 25 years working in local government and philanthropy, most recently coordinating pandemic-relief programs and public policy projects, as well as teaching workshops in policy writing. For more than a decade, she served on the community advisory board for Silicon Valley Reads.

Michelle holds a Bachelor’s in Journalism from Northwestern University and an MFA in Fiction Writing from Lesley University. Her short fiction has been published in The Journal, Pangyrus, and Cherry Tree and was shortlisted for The Masters Review Winter Short Story Award 2023-2024. She has read at the Bay Area Book Festival and Litquake’s LitCrawl and served as a juror for Lit Camp.

Michelle is currently at work on a novel about family secrets, faith, forgiveness, and what it means to be a “good daughter.”

She explores these themes in her quilting as well, often reworking traditional block designs to tell a story, commemorate a milestone, or give care. Descended from generations of talented sewists, Michelle made her first quilt in elementary school, under her mother’s guidance, around the time she wrote her first short fiction. She returned to quilting while in grad school and, ever since, her sewing is deeply intertwined with her writing. While cutting and piecing fabric, listening to color and pattern, or even ripping out errant seams and reworking problematic blocks, she often finds unexpected pathways for her storylines and characters.

patchwork quilt with images of books, writing, maps, globes